Metaphors and similes are an imaginative galaxy which greater minds than mine have explored. That doesn’t stop me gathering dazzling and original examples to enliven human exchange, expanding the choice of vigorous, beautiful ways to sharpen how we think, read, write and speak.

Expert in the next room

Saint-Exupéry, on the aerial front line of a desperate war effort, sums up the difficulties facing the French military leadership; not lack of military knowledge or experience, but of access to the reality on the ground. The General Staff was like a first-rate bridge...

Full retreat, full disaster

Saint-Exupéry uses a vivid simile to highlight the desperate and futile cost of trying to stem what was (at that time) an apparently invincible war machine. We had reached the last days of 1940, a time of full retreat, of full disaster. Crew after crew was being...

The seeds of civilization

Saint-Exupéry uses wheat as a metaphor for civilization, seeds stored and sown in order to take root in people, something nourishing, organic and dynamic, not simply carved in stone and forgotten about. For what is true of wheat is true also of a civilization. Wheat...

Like beads of a rosary

Perhaps a calming image, until you realize what it is being used to describe. I recall my father's recounting his childhood memories of phosphorous bombs in wartime Budapest. Saint-Exupery paints similarly searing pictures of flying under fire as a reconnaissance...

Flung into the fire

Saint-Exupéry, himself one of the fire-flung pilots of the French air force in the early, desperate days of the war, makes several damning observations on the futility-fatality quotient of their missions. His slim book, ostensibly describing a single sortie, paints a...

Rolling like …

A stone? A wheel? No, Faludy goes one better, and I was lucky to find a roll-able coin stamped with the head of a king who lost his. ... and in the evening the sun rolls down below the horizon like the severed head of a king. Speaking of 'rolling' and 'kings', see...

Someday the history of metaphor will be written and we shall at last grasp all the truths and misconceptions in which this intensely speculative subject abounds.

Source: Jorge Luis Borges, On Writing, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2010, p. 45

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All-encompassing flow

The cadence of this metaphor has the abundance and freshness of clear, flowing water. It likens Virgil, whom Dante views as the poet who taught him how to write, to...

As pale as…

This simile pleases me because I have an attachment to the colours used in eighteenth century interiors, and the kind of names given to those hues by paint companies and...

Spring cleaning your burrow

If you read Sea Room, you will fall in love with puffins, utterly endearing, quirky birds. Here Nicolson describes their appearance after the annual return to their burrows. They never...

Architecture that shouts for joy

A beautiful description of a church, capturing a soaring, up-swooping roof, and the exhilaration it can bring to the onlooker.

‘Arches that sprang upwards like a shout of joy to...

As helpless as …

The wonderful little girl Maggie, in a fit of pique and sorrow, hacks off her glorious dark curls and then succumbs to horror at the consequences, such as anger and...

As natural as…

If someone said 'as natural as...' what would pop into your mind? 'Tap water' seems unusual, but when we are being encouraged to drink tap water rather than commercially bottled...